Azure updates
Learn about important Azure product updates, roadmap and announcements. Subscribe to notifications to stay informed.
RSS feedJanuary 2020
Azure Lab Services automatically installs GPU drivers with GPU machines
Azure Lab Services now automatically installs the necessary GPU drivers for you when you create a lab with GPU machines. You no longer have to figure out which GPU driver to use on your own.
Azure Lab Services – Virtual machine shutdown for Windows users
Azure Lab Services added the ability to automatically shut down virtual machines when a users’ remote desktop (RDP) session is disconnected (Windows).
Azure DevTest Labs – Browser connect now generally available
Azure DevTest Labs recently released integration with Azure Bastion, enabling you to connect to your lab virtual machines through a web browser.
Minimum virtual machine sizing for Azure HDInsight cluster head nodes
Beginning 6 April 2020, customers will be able to choose only 4-core or higher virtual machines (VMs) as head nodes for the new HDInsight clusters. Existing clusters will continue to run as expected.
Azure spot virtual machine meter changes
From 3 February 2020, the resource GUIDs (also known as meter IDs) and names of Azure low-priority virtual machines on scale sets will change.
December 2019
Azure Backup resource group for virtual machines
Azure Backup policy for virtual machines (VMs) now lets you customise the resource group name created by Backup so you can update it as your company requires.
Azure SQL Database Gen 4 hardware approaching end of life in 2020
Target availability: Q4 2019
Azure SQL Database is beginning the decommissioning process of Gen 4 Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell)-based CPUs and is transitioning to Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3 GHz and Intel SP8160 (Skylake) processors for all new deployments.
Serial console for Azure Virual Machines now available in US Government Cloud
Serial console is now available in preview in the Azure US Government Cloud, allowing customers in the government-only clouds to access the serial console of their VMs or virtual machine scale set instances.
Azure Monitor for VMs now stores data in dedicated data types
Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs) now stores computer-related and process-related data in dedicated data types, making it simpler to query against as well as offering quicker data ingestion.
Azure Private Link support in AKS now in preview
Use Azure Private Link support in AKS to interact with the Kubernetes API server as a private endpoint in your virtual network, ensuring that all Kubernetes management operations remain completely isolated.
Proximity placement groups are now available
Proximity placement groups – an Azure Virtual Machine logical grouping capability to decrease inter-VM network latency – is now available.
Azure Dedicated Hosts now generally available
A new Azure service that provides physical servers capable of hosting one or more Azure virtual machines. The server is dedicated to your organisation and workloads.
November 2019
The D15_v2/DS15_v2 Azure Virtual Machines may no longer be isolated, starting 15 February 2020
We recently announced Azure Dedicated Host preview which allows you to run your organisation’s Linux and Windows Virtual Machines (VMs) on single-tenant physical servers
Azure Media Services now supports live transcription in preview
Azure Media Services provides a platform which you can use to ingest, transcode, and dynamically package and encrypt your live video for delivery. Live transcriptions is a new feature in the Azure Media Services v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to your viewers with machine-generated text that is transcribed from spoken words in the audio feed.
HPC Specialized VMs - HB and HC-series
Azure HB and HC Virtual Machines expand to new regions
Azure Key Vault Virtual Machine extension now generally available
The Azure Key Vault Virtual Machine extension makes it easier for apps running on virtual machines to use certificates from a key vault, by abstracting the common tasks as well as best practices.
Extension of Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure beyond virtual machines
Customer Lockbox provides customers with the capability to control Azure support engineers’ access to workloads that contain customer data. This expanded support now provides customers control over access to their data for a larger set of Azure offerings.
Azure Disk Encryption in more places, and more services offering customer-managed keys
Azure Disk Encryption enables you to encrypt your Azure Virtual Machine disks with your keys safeguarded in Azure Key Vault.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL Single Server – Reserved capacity is now available
Azure Database for PostgreSQL Single Server reserved capacity is now available to reserve compute power for your existing and future PostgreSQL servers.
Azure Database for MariaDB – Reserved capacity is now available
Azure Database for MariaDB reserved capacity is now available to reserve compute power for your existing and future MariaDB servers.
Azure at Ignite
Read the Azure blog for the latest news.
BlogTell us what you think of Azure and what you want to see in the future.
Provide feedbackAzure is available in more regions than any other cloud provider.
Check product availability in your region